The World's Finest Mystery Part 14

"It was the police?"

"Yes. You see, when you're in trade, when other people see you doing well, you make enemies..."

"What did they want?"

"Our plates... you see, somebody who wanted to do us harm had told them we were... doing things we shouldn't. So they've taken the plates and..."

"Not all of them."

She pulled the parcel of plates out from under the blanket. The candle wavered in his hand, sending shadows rocking across the room.

"How did they get there?"

"Trillow brought them."

He turned away. "I'll..." She waited, but he didn't say anything else, only put down the candle, grabbed the package from her and stumbled out.

Three days later, with casual apologies, a police constable returned fourteen engraved and etched copper plates of Saints in Triumph.

"We're safer now the police have made fools of themselves."

Trillow leaned back on the chaise-longue, brandy gla.s.s in hand. Ned stood by the table, compulsively sorting sticks of charcoal into a neat length-graded row. His face was yellower than ever in the lamplight, the boil on the back of his neck more vivid.

"If they'd found the other plates..."

"Luckily, one of us didn't panic."

"But to hide them in her bed... I don't see how you could think of it."

"It was either that or harder beds for all of us- her included."

"Not Ella, no."

"She helps you, doesn't she?"

"Not with those."

"Would the police believe that?"

Ned came up the step to the dais and stood at the end of the chaise-longue, hands clenched together.

"I'm getting out. Now. I want my share of the money and I'm getting out now."

"Where to, Ned? And how long will a couple of hundred pounds last you? Give it a few more weeks with the plates we've got and an open field and I'll guarantee you ten times that."

"What if the police come back?"

"Unlikely."

"And Kate?"

"I'll speak to her."

The next day at six o'clock it was getting dark and Ned was out buying ink powder. Ella was on her own in the kitchen, grating suet onto a plate ready for tomorrow's steak and kidney pudding. She was alarmed by her brother's nerviness and loss of weight and had decided that more red meat might counteract the overwork and the acid fumes. Every night shut into her rectangle of darkness, she fell asleep to the creaking of his printing press. Sometimes she woke as the first gray light was coming in through the crack between the doors and heard him still moving about next door. He was getting through their supplies at an unprecedented rate. Every morning the stacks of dampened paper were used up, the linseed oil bottle empty, the floor scattered with bits of ink-stained muslin. Every morning Ella tidied up, refilled bottles, damped more paper. The stacks of finished prints under weights on the drying bench were twice as high as usual. She thought about it as white flakes of suet piled into a pyramid, and imagined their saints being seen and possessed from Land's End to the Hebrides or even further afield, going with the missionaries along the steaming rivers of Africa or across the plains of China. Then the kitchen door opened and Trillow walked in, pouring blood.

Most of it came from a torn ear, though she didn't realize that at the time. She saw the odd way he was walking, hunched forward with his head sunk into his shoulders and a hand clapped over his left ear. Blood was seeping through his fingers, running down inside his coat sleeve and soaking the cuff of his shirt. He came lurching across the room and, without speaking, leaned his elbows on the table where she'd been working, his head down. She gasped and dropped the grater, scattering suet. It mingled with the drops of blood coming through his fingers onto the table. He asked in a terrible flat voice where Ned was. She gasped, "Out."

"Water. In a bowl."

Shaking, she filled a soup tureen with water from the bucket in the corner, slopping it over the floor. He pulled a chair up to the table, grabbed the pudding cloth, soaked it in the water and held it to his ear. When she took a proper look at his face she gave a little scream. His left eye was closed, the flesh around it swollen and purple-red. His lip was split and a line of congealed blood ran down his chin. The pudding cloth was already turning red.

"More cloth."

She ran into her brother's printing room and came back with a roll of muslin, used the kitchen knife to hack pieces off it. She pa.s.sed piece after piece to him. As each one was soaked he let it drop to the floor and grabbed another. Gradually the flood slowed until the pieces were only stained pink. He took a long shuddering breath.

"Brandy. Down in the studio."

It took her a long time to find it. When she got back he took the bottle and drank from it, shivering as the brandy went down. His ear had stopped bleeding but the swollen eye looked worse.

"Should I put some steak on it?"

He nodded. She went to the meat safe and took out the sliver of rump steak on its chipped plate, feeling a pang of regret for her brother's dinner, but mostly relief that she had anything to offer Trillow. He scooped it off the plate and clapped it over his eye.

"What... what happened?"

She hardly dared ask and thought for a long time he wasn't going to answer. Then he said, wincing from the split lip, "There was a ruffian mistreating a woman."

"Oh." She felt as if somebody had punched her in the chest. "You fought him?"

"What else could I do?"

"Wasn't there anybody else there? n.o.body to help?"

He started shaking his head, then stopped because it was dislodging the steak.

"n.o.body. Just me."

"And she?"

"She's alright."

Ella stood looking at him, so full of love that she thought it would burst her whole body apart. Love and envy, because she knew that she'd have given or done anything, suffered any of the torments the saints did before they triumphed, if she could have been the woman he'd rescued.

Much later, with Ella upstairs, Ned and Trillow talked in low voices in the studio. Trillow was on the chaise-longue, Ned hunched on the floor beside it.

"Her young man, that's what Kate called him. Protector's what she means."

"Did you hit him back?"

"If you think you can stop a fourteen-stone costermonger with a slug of lead in his fist, you go and discuss it with them next time."

"Next time?"

"They won't go away, Ned. She's decided she wants a quarter share and she says she's going to get it. She's coming here tomorrow and wants an answer."

"Here?"

"To pose as usual, d.a.m.n her. She says now she's going to be a shareholder she wants to be sure the profits keep up."

When Ella went into Ned's workroom at breakfast time she expected to find him asleep as usual, on his camp bed beside the printing press. Instead there was a note on the table in his handwriting saying he'd gone out and wouldn't be back till the afternoon. Later, Trillow came up for his tea and toast, fully dressed with his working smock over his shirt. In spite of the steak his eye was still half closed and the bruise around it was glowing greenish-purple, like a puffed-out pigeon's breast. He hardly seemed to notice Ella, beyond saying that Catherine would be coming at ten and he'd let her in himself.

Ella stayed in the kitchen, tidying up and ironing. She heard the knock on the door just after ten, one pair of feet going downstairs, two pairs coming up to the landing below and the studio door closing. The house was quiet, apart from the occasional cart rumbling past. Then, when she was on the last of Ned's shirts, there was an interruption. Quick feet came tapping up the stairs from the floor below and a woman's voice outside the door called, "Anybody there?" She opened the door and there was Catherine in the long green wrap that Trillow kept for his models, yellow hair cascading over her shoulders and down to her waist. Ella stood with the shirt over her arm, dumbfounded. She was always uneasy in the presence of the saints, awed by whatever quality it was that they possessed and she didn't. None of them had come up to her kitchen before.

"Got a gla.s.s, ducky? 'E's gone and broken the one downstairs."

She ran to the cupboard, took out one of their thick drinking tumblers and handed it over. Then, still tongue-tied, she shut the door and heard the feet going back downstairs. Only a few minutes after that the scream came ripping up through the floorboards, a terrible bubbling scream like a curlew's cry only longer and louder, feet pounding upstairs and Trillow's discolored face at the door, saying something she didn't understand until he grabbed her by the shoulder and said it again. She must run to the doctor around the corner and tell him to come at once, because Catherine had drunk acid.

She had to tell the coroner about it, and the ten men on the jury who sat staring at her in a way that made her feel she'd done something wrong. She told them how quickly she'd run, not even stopping to put on hat or coat. It wasn't her fault that the doctor was away on a confinement and she had had to run again to a house three streets away, dodging carts and carriages, slipping in gutters. It wasn't her fault that by the time she'd got back, with the doctor running alongside, Catherine was beyond speaking, almost beyond breathing, beyond anything except terrible harsh yelping noises that Ella heard through the closed door out on the landing, with the landlady and the other tenants crowding round, whispering, staring. Then Ned had arrived.

It turned out, much later, that he'd been out looking for other lodgings for himself and Ella. He'd collapsed there on the landing and had to be carried upstairs. The coroner wanted to know about Ella's last sight of Catherine. Had she appeared distressed or agitated? Ella shook her head and had to be reminded to speak up. No. Had Ella seen or heard her go into the workroom next to the kitchen where the bottle of nitric acid was kept? No. She'd been back in the kitchen, door closed. When Ella was allowed to step down, Trillow followed her into the witness box, tall and grave in his black top hat. It was the first time Ella had seen him since the day Catherine died. He'd left the house that same evening, after a conversation with Ned that she didn't hear. She'd asked Ned where he was lodging but he'd said he didn't know.

Now, as he gave his evidence, her eyes didn't stray from his face. She noticed that his lip was healed and there was only a faint yellow tinge around his eye. He answered the questions put to him in a calm and grave voice. Catherine Bell was an artist's model and had sat for him many times for religious pictures. She suffered from moods in which she would make threats against both herself and other people for bringing her to her low state in life. Yes sir, she had on occasions spoken of wishing to end it all. How he wished he could have guessed that on that occasion she really meant it. Yes, he'd believed it was gin she had in the gla.s.s. Yes sir, Miss Bell was accustomed to drink gin in the mornings.

The verdict was suicide, without the rider "while of unsound mind." When the three of them met on the steps outside, Trillow raised his hat to Ella, stared Ned blankly in the face and walked away.

Ned and Ella went home in silence to pack. They were moving out of London, down to the coast. The next morning a cart would come for the printing press, the plates and bottles, their few household goods. Ned thought there might be a market for seaside pictures, piers and so on.

"Peers?" Ella had questioned, her distraught mind picturing men in ermine and coronets on the sands.

"Piers and promenades. Not too many people, except in the middle distance with sunshades."

As long as he didn't have to do detailed figures, he could manage both drawing and engraving himself. They'd live. Still in silence they wrapped unused copper plates in bits of clean sheet, stowed inks, instruments and bottles in baskets. As the orange light of the setting sun was coming through the window they knelt on the bare floor, cording up the last package. With her finger on the half-made knot to hold it while her brother tightened the string, Ella spoke at last.

"He killed her, didn't he?"

The string went slack. She glanced sideways and saw Ned kneeling, head down.

"How did you know?"

"The bottle. It was empty when I looked in the morning, before she came upstairs. I know because I thought how quickly it was going."

His head went lower. She knew she was hurting him, but there were things that must be said and she could only say them in this gap, when the old life had finished and a new one not yet started.

"And now I know why he killed her. I understood this morning at the inquest- what sort of woman she was."

"Ella, it's not right for you..."

"No, listen. It's because of what you and Trillow were doing."

He groaned "I never wanted to. I swear on our mother's grave I never wanted to."

"The saints. Your lovely saints, and everybody all over the world seeing them. They were so beautiful, especially Catherine. He'd made her a saint and then, somehow, he found out that she wasn't worthy of it and..."

Ned was trembling and crying, great drops falling and spreading over the wooden floorboards.

"Ned, don't judge him harshly. I know it was wicked of him but he was so pure... so pure, you see." She was crying now too. She felt Ned's shaking arm around her shoulders. "I'm right, aren't I, that's why he did it? Because she wasn't worthy."

"Yes, yes. Don't cry now. Oh, don't cry."

Later, packing up the things in the kitchen when Ned was downstairs, she found an engraved copper plate under the mattress in her bed cupboard. She knew it must have slipped out from the parcel that Trillow had given her the night the police came. Curious, she took it over to the lamplight and looked at the grooves in the bright copper. She'd learned to see the picture on a plate as clearly as if it were printed on paper. It was one of the saints, an ecstatic smile on her face and long hair flowing, spreadeagled and ready for a kind of martyrdom that she couldn't imagine and was clearly too terrible to be in any of the books. She stared at it for a while but when she heard her brother coming upstairs she pushed it back into the bed cupboard, where it would stay when they left so that there was nothing to remind him.

Lawrence Block.

Let's Get Lost.

LAWRENCE BLOCK got famous the hard way. Took him well into his third decade of professional writing to do it, but there he was in the spotlight- equally lauded for his comic Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries and for his dark novels about private investigator Matt Scudder. Along the way, Block wrote just about every form of commercial fiction there is, and did all of it with his usual style and grace. Authors don't get much more readable than Larry Block, who has been feted with the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award. After a sentence or two of "Let's Get Lost," which was first published in the September/October issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, we guarantee you'll be hooked.

Let's Get Lost.

Lawrence Block.

When the phone call came I was parked in front of the television set in the front room, nursing a gla.s.s of bourbon and watching the Yankees. It's funny what you remember and what you don't. I remember that Thurman Munson had just hit a long foul that missed being a home run by no more than a foot, but I don't remember who they were playing, or even what kind of a season they had that year.

I remember that the bourbon was J. W. Dant, and that I was drinking it on the rocks, but of course I would remember that. I always remembered what I was drinking, though I didn't always remember why.

The boys had stayed up to watch the opening innings with me, but tomorrow was a school day, and Anita took them upstairs and tucked them in while I freshened my drink and sat down again. The ice was mostly melted by the time Munson hit his long foul, and I was still shaking my head at that when the phone rang. I let it ring, and Anita answered it and came in to tell me it was for me. Somebody's secretary, she said.

I picked up the phone, and a woman's voice, crisply professional, said, "Mr. Scudder, I'm calling for Mr. Alan Herdig of Herdig and Crowell."

"I see," I said, and listened while she elaborated, and estimated just how much time it would take me to get to their offices. I hung up and made a face.

"You have to go in?"